The Bridge (7 page)

On July 16, one gang got the wheels back and forth fifty-one times, and on July 22, another gang duplicated it. A few days
later, the gang under Bob Anderson, the boomer who had been so irresistible to women back on the Mackinac Bridge, was moving
along with such flawless precision that with an hour to go of working time it had already registered forty-seven trips. If
all went well in the remaining hour, six more trips could be added—meaning a record total of fifty-three.

"Okay, let's move it," Anderson yelled down the line to his gang, all of them focusing on what they hoped would be the winning
wheel.

They watched it move smoothly along the tramway overhead, then it rolled higher to the tower, then down, down faster to the
anchorage, then up again, quickly reloaded, up the tramway— "Keep moving, you mother!"—closer and closer to the tower now
. . . then it stopped.

"Bitch!" screamed one of the punks.

"What the hell's wrong?" shouted Anderson.

"The engine's conked out," some punk finally yelled. "Those goddamn idiots!"

"Let's go beat their asses," yelled another punk, quite serious and ready to run down the catwalk.

"Calm down," Anderson said, with resignation, looking up at the stilled wheel, shaking his head. "Let me go down and see what
can be done."

He went down to the anchorage, only to learn that the engine failure could not be fixed in time to continue the race within
the hour. So Anderson walked back up, sadly giving the news to his men, and when they walked down the catwalk that night,
their hardhats under their arms, their brows sweaty, they looked like a losing football team leaving the field after the game.
In the remaining two months, no gang could top the mark of fifty-one, but in September, when the gangs started to place the
two-thousand-pound castings over the cables (the castings are metal saddles which would help support the 262 suspender ropes
that would stream down vertically from each cable to hold up the deck), a new kind of competition began: a game to see who
could bolt into position the most castings, and this got to be dangerous. Not only were bolts dropping off the bridge in this
frenzied race—bolts that could pepper the decks of passing vessels and possibly kill anybody they hit—but the castings themselves
were unwieldy, and if one of them fell . . .

"Chrissake, Joe, let's get the bolts out and put that mother on," one pusher yelled to Joe Jacklets, who was being cautious
with the casting.

The pusher, noticing that another gang working down the catwalk had already removed the bolts and were clamping the casting
into place, was getting nervous—his gang was behind.

"Take it easy," Joe Jacklets said, "this thing might not hold."

"It'll hold."

So Joe Jacklets removed the last bolt of the two-section casting and, as soon as he did, one half of the casting—weighing
one thousand pounds—toppled off the cable and fell from the bridge.

"Jes-sus !"

"Ohhhhhhh."

"Kee-rist."

"Noooooooooo !"

"Jes-SUS."

The gang, their hardhats sticking out over the catwalk, watched the one-thousand-pound casting falling like a bomb toward
the sea. They noticed, too, a tiny hydrofoil churning through the water below, almost directly below the spot where it seemed
the casting might hit. They watched quietly now, mouths open, holding their breaths. Then, after a loud plopping sound, they
saw a gigantic splash mushroom up from the water, an enormous fountain soaring forty feet high.

Then, swishing from under the fountain, fully intact, came the hydrofoil, its skipper turning his head away from the splashing
spray and shooting his craft in the opposite direction.

"Oh, that lucky little bastard," one of the men said, peering down from the catwalk, shaking his head.

Nobody said anything else for a moment. They just watched the water below. It was as if they hated to turn around and face
the catwalk—and later confront Hard Nose Murphy's fiery face and blazing eyes. They watched the water for perhaps two minutes,
watched the bubbles subside and the ripples move out. And then, moving majestically into the ripples, moving slowly and peacefully
past, was the enormous gray deck of the United States aircraft carrier
Wasp.

"Holy God!" Joe Jacklets finally said, shaking his head once more.

"You silly bastard," muttered the pusher. Jacklets glared at him.

"What do you mean? I told you it might not hold."

"Like hell you did, you . . ."

Jacklets stared back at the pusher, disbelieving; but then he knew it was no use arguing—he would collect his pay as soon
as he could and go back to the union hall and wait for a new job . . .

But before he could escape the scene, the whole line of bridgemen came down the catwalk, some cursing, a few smiling because
it was too ridiculous.

"What are you stupid bastards laughing at?" said the walkin' boss.

"Aw, com'on, Leroy," said one of the men, "can't you take a little joke?"

"Yeah, Leroy, don't take it so hard. It's not as if we lost the casting. If we know where a thing is, we ain't lost it."

"Sure, that's right," another said. "We know where it is— it's in the river."

The walkin' boss was just too sick to answer. It was he who would later have to face Murphy.

Across on the other catwalk, the rival gang waved and a few of the younger men smiled, and one yelled out, "Hey, we set ten
castings today. How many did you guys set?"

"Nine and a half," somebody else answered.

This got a laugh, but as the workday ended and the men climbed down from the bridge and prepared to invade Johnny's Bar, Joe
Jacklets was seen walking with his head down.

If a casting had to fall, it could not have fallen on a better day-September 20, a Friday—because, with work stopped for the
weekend anyway, the divers might be able to locate the casting and have it pulled up out of the water before the workers returned
to the bridge on Monday. There was no duplicate of the casting, and the plant where it was made was on strike, and so there
was no choice but to fish for it—which the divers did, with no success, all day Saturday and Sunday. They saw lots of other
bridge parts down there, but no casting. They saw riveting guns, wrenches, and bolts, and there was a big bucket that might
have been the one that had fallen with four bolt machines, each worth eight hundred dollars.

Even if it was, the machines as well as the other items were now unserviceable, having been ruined either by the water or
the jolt they received when hitting the sea from such high altitudes. Anyway, after a brief inspection of all the tools down
there, the divers could easily believe the old saying, "A bridgeman will drop everything off a bridge but money."

Yet this is not precisely true; they drop money off, too. A few five-dollar and ten-dollar bills, even twenty-dollar bills,
had been blown off the bridge on some windy Fridays—Friday is payday. And during the cable-spinning months, inasmuch as the
men were working long hours, they received their pay on the bridge from four clerks who walked along the catwalks carrying
more than $200,000 in bundles of cash in zippered camera cases. The cash was sealed in envelopes with each bridgeman's name
printed on the outside, and the bridgeman would have to sign a receipt as he received his envelope from the clerk. Some bridgemen,
however, after signing the receipt slip, would rip open the envelope and count the money—and that is when they would lose
a few bills in the wind. More cautious men would rip off a corner of the envelope, clutching it tight, and count the tips
of the bills. Others would just stuff the envelope into their pockets without counting. Still others seemed so preoccupied
with their work, so caught up in the competitive swing of spinning, that when the pay clerk arrived with the receipt slip,
a pencil, and the envelope, the bridge-man would hastily scribble his name on the slip, then turn away without taking the
envelope. Once, as a joke, a clerk named Johnny Cothran walked away with a man's envelope containing more than four hundred
dollars, wondering how far he could get with it. He got about twenty feet when he heard the man yelling, "Hey!"

Cothran turned, expecting to face an angry bridgeman. But instead the bridgeman said, "You forgot your pencil." Cothran took
the pencil, then handed the bridgeman his envelope. "Thanks," he said, stuffing it absently into his pocket and then quickly
getting back to the cable-spinning race.

On Monday, September 23, shortly before noon, the casting was discovered more than one hundred feet below the surface of the
narrows, and soon the cranes were swooping over it and pulling it up out of the water. The whole bridge seemed, briefly, to
breathe more easily, and Murphy (who had been swearing for three straight days) suddenly calmed down. But two days later,
Murphy was again shaking his head in disgust and frustration. At 3:15 P.M. on Wednesday, September 25, somebody on the catwalk
had dropped a six-inch steel bolt and, after it had fallen more than one hundred feet, it had hit a bridgeman named Berger
Hanson in the face and gone four inches through his skin right under his left eye.

Berger had been standing below the bridge at the time and had been looking up. If he hadn't been looking up the fallen bolt
might have hit his hardhat and merely jarred him, instead of doing the damage it did—lifting his eyeball upward, crushing
his jawbone, getting stuck in his throat.

Rushed to Victory Memorial Hospital in Brooklyn, Berger was met by the surgeon, Dr. S. Thomas Coppola, who treated all injuries
to the bridgemen. Quickly, Dr. Coppola removed the bolt, stopped the bleeding with stitches, then realigned by hand the facial
bones and restitched the jaw.

"How do you feel?" Dr. Coppola asked.

"Okay," said Berger.

Dr. Coppola was flabbergasted. "Don't you have any pain?"

"No."

"Can I give you anything—an aspirin or two?"

"No, I'm okay."

After plastic surgery to correct the deformation of his face, and after a few months' recuperation, Berger was back on the
bridge.

Dr. Coppola was amazed not only by Berger but by the stoicism he encountered in so many other patients among bridgemen.

"These are the most interesting men I've ever met," Dr. Coppola was telling another doctor shortly afterward. "They're strong,
they can stand all kinds of pain, they're full of pride, and they live it up. This guy Berger has had five lives already,
and he's only thirty-nine. . . . Oh, I'll tell you, it's a young man's world."

True, the bridge is a young man's world, and old men like Benny Olson leave it with some bitterness and longing, and hate
to be deposited in the steelyard on the other side of the river—a yard where old men keep out of trouble and younger men,
like Larry Tatum, supervise them.

Larry Tatum, a tall, broad-shouldered, daring man of thirty-seven, had been spotted years ago by Murphy as a "stepper," which,
in bridge parlance, means a comer, a future leader of bridgemen.

Tatum had started as a welder when he was only seventeen years old, and had become a riveter, a fine connector, a pusher.
He had fallen occasionally, but always came back, and had never lost his nerve or enthusiasm. He had four younger brothers
in the business, too—three working under Murphy on the bridge, one having died under Murphy after falling off the Pan Am building.
Larry Tatum's father, Lemuel Tatum, had been a boomer since the twenties, but now, pushing seventy, he also was in the steelyard,
working under his son, the stepper, watching the boy gain experience as a walkin' boss so that, quite soon, he would be ready
for a promotion to the number-one job, superintendent.

It was just a little awkward for Larry Tatum, though it was not obvious, to be ordering around so many old boomers—men with
reputations, like Benny the Mouse, and Lemuel Tatum, and a few dozen others who were in the yard doing maintenance on tools
or preparing to load the steel links of the span on barges soon to be floated down to the bridge site. But, excepting for
some of Olson's unpredictable explosions, the old men generally were quiet and cooperative— and none more so than the former
heavyweight boxing champion, James J. Braddock.

Once they had called Braddock the "Cinderella Man" because, after working as a longshoreman, lie won the heavyweight title
and earned almost $1,000,000 until his retirement in 1938, after Joe Louis beat him.

Now Braddock was nearly sixty, and was back on the waterfront. His main job was to maintain a welding machine. His clothes
were greasy, his fingernails black, and his arms so dirty that, it was hard to see the tattoos he had gotten one night m the
Bowery, in 1921, when he was a frolicsome boy of sixteen.

Now Braddock was earning $170 a week as an oiler, and some men who did not know Braddock might say as men so often like to
say of former champions, "Well, easy come, easy go. Now he's broke, just like Joe Louis."

But his was not another maudlin epic story about a broken prizefighter. Braddock, as he walked slowly around the steelyard,
friendly to everyone, his big body erect and his chest out, still was a man of dignity and pride—he was still doing an honest
days work, and this made him feel good.

"What the hell, I'm a working man," he said. "1 worked as a longshoreman before I was a fighter, and now I need the money,
so I'm working again. 1 always liked hard work. There's nothing wrong with it."

He lost $15,000 on a restaurant, Braddock's Corner, once on West Forty-ninth Street in Manhattan, and the money he had put
into a marine supply house, which he operated for ten years, proved not to be a profitable venture. But he still owns the
$14,000 home he bought in North Bergen, New Jersey, shortly after the Joe Louis fight, he said, and he still loves his wife
of thirty-three years' marriage, and still has his health and a desire to work hard, and has two sons who work hard, too.

One son, Jay, who is thirty-two, weighs 330 pounds and stands six feet five inches. He works in a Jersey City powerhouse;
the other, thirty-one-year-old Howard, is a 240-pounder who is six feet seven inches and is in road construction. "So don't
feel sorry for me," James J. Braddock, the former Cinderella Man, said, inhaling on a cigarette and leaning forward on a big
machine. "Don't feel sorry for me one bit."